Thursday, June 21, 2007

American By Birth, Southern Because My Mom Was Stupid Enough To Marry My Father

James Joyner, Outside The Beltway, has a post up "American By Birth, Southern By The Grace Of God", that goes on to extol the virtues southerners and the southern way of life.
Despite the fact that I’ve never skinned a buck or run a trout line (nor chewed Beechnut, let alone had any desire to spit it in some dude’s eyes) there’s an undeniable appeal to the pride and raw emotion of the sentiments. And while it’s undeniably exclusionary — one can’t have an Us without a Them, after all– it’s decidedly not geographical but cultural.
Kevin Drum hit on the theme that southerners have a victim complex and will only vote for other southerners.
I can't begin to tell you how tired I am of the South's victim complex. Five of our last seven presidents have been from the South and the other two have been from the Southwest — and the reason, as near as I can tell, is that most Southerners just flatly refuse to vote for anyone who comes from north of the Mason-Dixon Line. And yet, somehow, it's the rest of us who are supposedly intolerant of Southern culture. Feh.
Joyner goes on further that it's about culture and a sharing of common values.
It’s not that Southerners will only vote for a guy who sounds like them. Reagan, Bush 41, and Nixon didn’t. It’s about values. As the bumper sticker puts it, God, Guts, and Guns. Northerners who can talk to people in those terms have a good shot at getting Southern and rural votes.
Well, speaking as a southerner who has caught and cleaned fish and killed and skinned a buck it doesn't endow you with any special American-ness. Southerners have no more sense of values than anyone else. We have no more values than anyone else. Southerners still think that car racing is a sport, and that the civil war was fought over states rights. Those two things should tell you something. They can be just as rude, uncouth and stupid as anyone else. To say that a group of people or for a group of people to claim that they are more special because of where they live is to believe the lies told by the media and to accept the republican's southern strategy. It's all bullshit.

Kevin Drum got it right, kind of. So did James Joyner, kind of. Southerners think they're special because people keep telling them they are. They sure didn't do anything to deserve it.

As to the title, my mom met my dad at a naval hospital in Connecticut where she was stationed as a nurse during WWII. I'm southern born, but only half southern bred.


Jim Martin

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4 Comments:

Anonymous Anonymous said...

"They can be just as rude, uncouth and stupid as anyone else."
But they do it in such a subtle Southern way... :)

9:47:00 PM  
Blogger Jim Martin said...

Subtle southerners, let me ponder that.

3:47:00 AM  
Blogger Capt. Fogg said...

Of course all sweeping generalizations are wrong, including this one, but I'm beginning to understand the southern dislike for the North a little bit better even though I'm more confused about it every day.

Sure, the War of Northern Aggression was about states rights, but I think there are more follow-the-leader royalists down here than up there. We, and I say we because I include myself, dislike the safety-over-liberty bias of the North and tend to think Northerners get up every morning and before they put on their black clothes, wonder about what scary, scary things we can make disappear by banning something. Criticizing the President? That should be banned.

On the other hand, they are happier to give up personal liberty if they get to wave flags and cheer our army in that great superbowl in Iraq. They wonder that you wonder why we put God on the money because down here God is on your gas bill and half your monthly invoices and all your neighbors' trucks have religious messages on them.

We are not impressed that your black Lexus with its blacked out windows can park itself because it's still slower than cousin Lester's Mustang that only hits on 7 cylinders until it warms up and you're damned right that racing is a sport, whether you do it with horses, cars, trucks, ATVs or greased pigs.

Of course I still voted for Kerry.

10:47:00 AM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

I don't think they have a victim complex, they just vote for the people they like. most northerners didn't like john kerry much either. the problem is that what they vote on effects us here in the north and vice versa. They had every right to sucede in 1861 and should have been allowed to do so. we would have avoided alot of these problems if there were two smaller governments instead of one big one. and there'd be less bad feelings

1:33:00 PM  

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